- Speaking in February of the man she knows better than
anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator
and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination Barack Obama,
is the only candidate for president who understands that before America
can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their "broken souls."
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- She also said that her husband's unique understanding
of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified
to be President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race
Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican
presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his countrymen's broken souls.
He will redeem them.
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- But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't
place the whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for
him. As she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is
going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions.
That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort
zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack
will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
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- At base, Mrs. Obama's statement is nothing less than
a renunciation of democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of
liberty is that people have a natural right to live their lives as usual
and to be uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to
expect that their government will butt out of their souls.
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- IN CONTRAST, fascist societies, as Jonah Goldberg notes
in the latest issue of National Review, are all about the notions of "unity"
and "change" and melding our broken souls into a fixed, united
will for change that Obama has made the core theme of his campaign. Goldberg
compared "unity" with "patriotism," and explained that
while the latter connotes the willingness to defend the moral values of
a society, unity is bereft of any moral content. "The only value of
unity is strength, strength in numbers - and... that is a fascist value.
That's the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that in combination
are invincible."
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- Many commentators have argued that Jews in both Israel
and the US have a specific reason to fear an Obama presidency. Much attention
has been paid to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the anti-Semitic, black supremacist
preacher who has served as Obama's spiritual guide for the past 20 years.
Then too, there are Obama's foreign policy advisors who range from the
viscerally hostile towards Israel (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley,
Samantha Power, Merrill Tony McPeak) to the messianically hostile towards
Israel (Dan Kurtzer). Obama's close associations with Palestinian and pan-Arab
champions and jihad apologists like the late Edward Said and Prof. Rashid
Khalidi, and his stated intention to have open negotiations with Iran about
the mullocracy's nuclear weapons program, his monetary ties to anti-Israel
donors like George Soros and to anti-Israel organizations like Moveon.org
are similarly pointed to as reasons for concern.
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- But the fact is that for all his associations with Israel-bashers,
Obama's stated positions on the Palestinian and Arab conflict with Israel
are all but indistinguishable from those of his opponent Senator Hillary
Clinton. Both democratic candidates assert that the Palestinian conflict
with Israel is the root of the pathologies of the Arab world. Like President
George W. Bush, both embrace the Fatah terror group as a legitimate organization
and acceptable repository of Palestinian sovereignty. Both have hinted
that they may be willing to open negotiations with Hamas. Both argue that
the establishment of a Palestinian state will be a key foreign policy objective
of their administrations.
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- While Sen. Clinton rejects Obama's desire to openly appease
the Iran's mullahs, her announced strategy for contending with the specter
of a nuclear-armed Iran would not necessarily be more effective than Obama's
plan to appease the ayatollahs. Last week, Clinton explained that she believes
that the US's position on Iran should be based on a credible threat of
"massive retaliation" in the event that the mullocracy develops
and uses nuclear weapons.
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- THERE ARE two reasons that a deterrence model will be
as ineffective in curbing Iranian aggression as Obama's appeasement model.
First, as last week's 25th anniversary of the Iranian-sponsored bombing
of the US embassy in Beirut recalled, Iran has been attacking the US and
its allies both directly and through proxies since 1979. To date, not only
has the US failed to deter such attacks, it has never made Iran pay a price
for them. With this abysmal track record against a non-nuclear Iran, it
is hard to see how the US can threaten a nuclear-armed Iran with sufficient
credibility to make a deterrence-based strategy successful.
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- The second reason that basing US policy towards Iran
on a deterrence model will likely fail is because Iran's leadership has
made clear that is not necessarily concerned about the survivability of
Iran. From Ayatollah Khomeini to Ayatollah Khamenei to Ali Rafsanjani to
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's leadership has made clear that they are not
Iranian patriots but global Islamic revolutionaries. Given their millenarian,
apocalyptic view of their country's purpose in world affairs, there is
good reason to believe that a strategy based on some form of mutually assured
destruction would have only marginal impact on Iran's decision-makers.
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- So from a foreign policy perspective, there is little
to distinguish Sen. Clinton from Sen. Obama. Indeed, there is little that
distinguishes the two candidates from a domestic policy perspective. But
that gets us back to the messianic business.
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- OPPONENTS OF Clinton claim that she is a soulless woman
who will do whatever is necessary to have power, because she likes power
and wants it. But if this is true it is hard to see why a power-hungry
president is worse than a president who believes that he is the people's
redeemer. It is hard to see why a leader who wants power because she likes
power is less reasonable than a president who thinks he has a right to
demand that the American people follow his lead and fix their souls in
the name of unity. In the former case, opposition to the leader is a policy
dispute. In the latter case, it is apostasy.
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- When someone wants power for power's sake, that person
tends to be fairly pragmatic. In his first term of office, when former
president Bill Clinton - another consummate pragmatist who liked having
power - understood his wife's healthcare plan was about to be defeated
overwhelmingly by Congress, he shelved the plan and cut his losses.
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- A messianic wouldn't do that. When a messianic leader
is faced with failure, his tendency is to castigate the people, or his
political opposition, or the media as evil and to continue on unmoved and
bring his country down with him. President Woodrow Wilson's unpopular and
unsuccessful championing of US membership in the League of Nations and
former president Jimmy Carter's wooing of American enemies in the name
of peace are examples of what happens when messianic redeemer types are
confronted with reality.
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- So with this distinction between the two senators in
mind, the question is, how will a President Hillary Clinton or a President
Barack Obama respond after being shown that appeasement of the Palestinians
has once again failed and that appeasement or deterrence of the Iranian
regime has also failed once again? Given their distinct emotional makeup,
it can be assumed that Obama will argue that reality is wrong and continue
on - Carter-like - into the abyss and drag his country and Israel down
with him. Acting in a Clinton-like way, Clinton on the other hand, would
be more likely to pick a fight with Serbia - or call for a federal ban
on chewing tobacco in a bid to change the subject.
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- What is most interesting about the danger that Obama
constitutes for Israel is how un-unique it is. It is no different than
the danger the prospect his presidency constitutes for America. The reason
that pseudo-realist Israel bashers and messianic peace mongering Israel
bashers support Obama is because they naturally gravitate towards a man
on a mission to save the free world from itself.
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- An empowered, free citizenry will question the realism
behind their decision to pretend that the global jihad is the figment of
the Jewish lobby's imagination. A cowed, on its way to being redeemed by
Obama's cult of personality citizenry will be in no position to argue with
them.
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- The same is as true of domestic issues as it is of foreign
policy. When the Obama/Clinton tax hikes and economic protectionism exacerbate
the current US recession, under an Obama presidency, rather than debating
the merits of the administration's failed economic policies, the American
people will be told that they need to have more "discussions"
about race to remind them how mean they are and how much they are in need
of President Obama's spiritual healing. If they are again attacked by jihadists,
they will be lectured by Rev. Wright's longtime follower, their president,
about how black enslavement, his white grandmother, Israel, anti-abortion
senators and their own "cynicism" played a role in convincing
the jihadists to kill innocents.
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- US Jews have always had a weakness for messianic leaders
and movements. Sometimes, as in the case of the civil rights movement,
that tendency towards utopianism has had good results. More often it has
not. In the current presidential race, American Jews, like all their fellow
Americans, would be wise to consider if they are truly ready to accept
Obama as their savior.
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- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/obama_the_savior.html
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